Concurrent engineering - A new professionalism

If there's one point on which construction differs from industry, it's its medium-term trend, which is diametrically opposed to that observed in industrial circles.

Indeed, the act of building has never ceased to grow in complexity. The number of people involved is increasing, without any improvement in the overall quality of the product. This evolution, also experienced by the secondary sector, has been given a name: Taylorization. Specialization means more and more tasks and roles.

What sets these two sectors apart is their reaction to this trend. The industry has responded by profoundly questioning the situation, while the construction industry sees a certain specificity, and even an original dimension, in it.

What's at issue here is the attitude to the need for integration. The industrial world, admittedly at the cost of a cultural revolution, believes it can better serve the market by being closer to demand. Manufacturers, on the other hand, pretend to escape this trend under the guise of localized production, marked by the fact that it is embedded in a particular site. Some even speak of the vernacular character of buildings.

The comparison between these two approaches would be pointless if it were confined to a term-by-term comparison, because it's clear that a building is not a mass-produced product.

But is the act of building so different from that of creating a manufactured object? This question has led some towards an interesting definition of "building" as an activity: the production of structures for a single purpose. So the usefulness of methods used in industry is no longer incongruous. Gaining in efficiency, rationalizing and economizing are all part of sound management. The specificity of the built environment lies not in its production, but in its use.

The benefits of such an approach are reinforced by the tools developed by the industrial company. In order to be more reactive and flexible, i.e. able to respond to more ad hoc demands, industry is engaging in the practice of concurrent engineering. The aim is to integrate the various stakeholders into a collective (figure 1 ) so as to achieve genuine optimization of resources, which is no longer a matter of juxtaposing local optima, but of genuine consultation.

The aim of this article is to explore this rapprochement in greater depth. It is divided into two parts:

• the first describes the...